Poor things.
I paid (again) my price at the Woke cinema, (also) for family reasons, and went to see Poor Things. I have little to say about the film itself: Emma Stone has incredible acting. You tell her to be a teapot, she becomes a teapot and you SEE a teapot. She's not the only one in the cast: essentially, there are those who decide to be a goat, you look at their face and you see a goat. There's little to say about this: the actors are practically superhuman. One decides to be a simp, he becomes a simp and you see a simp.
But let's get to the contents. The film takes place in a kind of nineteenth-century Frankenstein world. What does it mean? Frankenstein is part of a branch of nineteenth-century science fiction born from the suggestion of Alessandro Volta's experiments. He took half a frog, and stimulated its nervous system with an electric current. Since the muscles contracted, something like "life is electricity, since we can reanimate an animal with electric current: by continuing the research in this way, we will be able to resurrect the dead". From that moment on, science fiction flourishes in which in the (mad) surgeon's laboratory there are lightning and thunderbolts, which usually serve to give life to pseudo-living or revived beings.
The aesthetic is close to that of steampunk, but strangely it is not a steampunk with gothic colours, except in the first part, when it has to resort to black and white to give a sense of "gothic" to the film.
It happens that a pregnant woman (but not seen at the moment) decides to commit suicide by jumping into a river. The reasons can be understood later. However he throws himself and dies. But the nineteenth-century professor/genius on duty arrives, who among other things applies his own theories to himself, and "saves" her. “Save” means that he extracts the dead fetus from the corpse, takes the dead child's brain and transplants it in place of the suicide's brain, since he considers it dysfunctional (“he chose not to be”).
Then, using this very electric thing, very Alessandro Volta, he reanimates it.
From that moment we enter the (now much abused) field of the "idiot savant": a human being raised or generated without the weight of prejudices and human society is found in human society, behaves in a spontaneous and rational manner, and puts exposing the hypocrisies and contradictions of the current society. Whether it's people raised in the jungle by monkeys, people born and raised on Mars, guys raised by wolves, American Indians or other places, or an alien, the result doesn't change: since our "external eye "He doesn't know that he has to lie and always tells the truth, so he tells the truths that we don't tell about ourselves, and we are all traumatized.
Martians, go home!
Among the unspeakable, spectacular and sensational truths of the film we find unimaginable things such as "fucking is beautiful", "orgasm is beautiful", "Portuguese sweets are good", "brothels exist in France", "the poor exist ”, and other absolute novelties that we find very interesting and unheard of, such as the idea of the socialist black lesbian sex worker: in Lib American society, an absolute novelty. Never boring: in fact these are the moments that people choose to go to the bathroom, and I enjoyed a half-empty cinema because everyone was in the toilet. I'm not suggesting that these are overused gimmicks, I'm saying that the bathrooms at the UFA in Düsseldorf are suited to philosophy.
Or boredom.
Let's be clear: with actors like that and a director of photography like that, you can also make a grotesque, boring and predictable film like this. So I'm not telling you not to go and see it. For example, you can look closely at the protagonist's "resting" nipples, and then notice the difference when the protagonist is "at work". I don't know how they did it, but when the AI wants to emulate Stone, it will have all the data it needs and will be able to go into detail.
In any case, the acting ability of ALL the protagonists is so strong, or pushed to the extreme, that it is worth watching to learn what actors do to pay the bills. I repeat: these are people you tell to make a teapot, they become teapots, and you SEE a teapot. Impressive.
I would like to say a few words about all the absurd articles that are painting the film as "feminist", which would make men look bad, which would be poor things.
I'll be honest, it's very difficult to feel offended by those men, because it's very difficult to identify with them. This is essentially a sample NOT representative of the male population.
In the order:
- A kind of crazy professor who doesn't fuck because of the extreme endocrine consequences this act has on his body (plus, it's implied, injuries caused by a father who was a sadistic lunatic).
- A loser simp who organizes a circumvention of an incompetent person, in order to be able to sexually abuse what seems (at the moment) to be mentally handicapped, "marrying" her to keep her imprisoned. When the "Baxter" leaves, the simp has another one assembled by the professor. He was truly in love.
- A slimy lawyer who lends himself to the simp's and the professor's plan, except that he then practically takes the mental handicap mentioned above and takes her with him to Portugal to screw her.
- A cynical black man, who as a cynic is a shit of a person, and is a cynic as a shit of a person.
- An ex-husband of the protagonist, who is already a marine in post-traumatic shock, before Vietnam was fashionable. He continually threatens the servants with a gun, and you immediately understand why the woman was committing suicide. (And then Briatore says that the waiters can't be found.)
We could say that not even women come out so well: let's go to an existentialist maitresse who doesn't hesitate to employ people who have mental flaws, (thank you, Sasha Grey, for teaching the word "existentialist" to Americans, so they feel intelligent! ), to the socialist black lesbian sex worker – all that was missing was that she was also genderfluid and a Palestinian flag wouldn't have been a bad thing: if you do a cliche, do it well – the old big-haired onanist who has the black toyboy (but cynical: size matters , we'll think about the brain later). I wouldn't say they come out very well either.
These two things, that is, the fact that it is impossible to identify with the male protagonists and that there are no noteworthy female counterparts, removes all the aura from "Poor things" which was intended to be attached "to men": it is about a sample so thoroughly NOT representative, that my derogatory definition was a given. It's already obvious that they are poor people, it's impossible for me to identify, so I don't perceive the attack. It's as if you were trying to insult me by speaking badly of the mother of that guy who stole my bicycle: be my guest!
I know the "and there are no notable female counterparts" part is confusing you now. But I'm sorry, Bella Baxter, she's not a woman in the film. Ask yourself a question: was the brain of the transplanted fetus that of a boy or a girl?
The answer, if you are men, you will find by observing the sexual behavior of the protagonist: it is the behavior you would get if you took an adolescent male in the period of hormonal explosion and gave him a female body. The abundance of the offer and the satyriasis of the period from 14 to 18 would make him behave EXACTLY like Emma Baxter.And if you are male you know it very well.
Now feminists will tell me that I'm denying women some rights, like the right to have the sexuality of a teenager with hormones the size of a cow. Absolutely not: you can have the sexuality you want. But that stuff seems like the erotic dream of a horny teenager who thinks "if I were a woman, how easy it would be to get fucked, I'd walk around with the mattress glued to my shoulders".
To then discover what anyone who enters a gay sauna to pick up discovers: "damn, how difficult is it to find a decent one".
If it was difficult for me to feel hurt by the film because I can't identify with the males shown in the film, I find it even more difficult to be afraid of a woman with Bella Baxter's sexuality. First, because it's the same script recited by any porn star – nothing new then – second because if I met someone like that I would at most invite her to a healthy beer burping competition together with the rest of the barracks.
It's like telling me that if I met Little Sis Nora, who is actually Bella Baxter's character, I would run away. No, I wouldn't do it, if anything I would invite her for a beer. I'm a big fan of that!
And it's hard not to notice the resemblance between Bella Baxter and the pre-existing Little Sis Nora:
Ultimately, I would say, feminists get excited over nothing.
Unless…
Unless they mean that, in their real world, women are initiated into sex by perverse men who intend to exploit them when they are still children, then they discover that brothel life is really beautiful and interesting, as if it were any OnlyFans , and finally they end up marrying a simp and live with the money and the house resulting from the work of a man who is no longer with us.
Because if that's the case, honestly, you're going to be very popular in the manosphere.
If this film were, as always, a snapshot of the feminist's inner world, well… honestly, the poor things are you.